Facebook Vote Ends, Along With Your Right to Vote on Facebook

What if they threatened to shut down your right to vote and nobody cared? 'Tis the story of Facebook's recent site vote, which closed today at 12:00 p.m. PT.

Last week Facebook opened the polls for users to vote on changes to its Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR). In included a bunch of proposed changes, most of them arcane; one of the biggest was users' right to vote on Facebook's policies. The new version of the of the SRR, which users were allowed to vote on, removed the voting clause altogether, meaning that going forward Facebook users wouldn't be able to vote on proposed issues.

Well, it turns out that many Facebook users don't really care about that right to vote. They didn't even show up at the digital polls in the first place. Fewer than a million of Facebook's billion users voted.

According to the tally on Facebook's page, the majority of the users who did vote - 589,141 to be be precise - voted to keep the existing documents, which would allow users still to vote. On the other side, 79,731 users said they were in favor of the proposed revisions. Facebook requires that 30 percent of users vote (300 million) for any of the votes to be binding; with under a million voting, that clearly didn't occur.

"The Facebook Site Governance vote is now closed. Thank you for your participation. We will be announcing the results and the next steps regarding the governance process shortly, so check back soon," Facebook wrote on its Governance page. Facebook didn't have any further comment when reached by ABC News, but it certainly looks like Facebook's voting system is a thing of the past.